The latest release from Netflix, True Memoirs of an International Assassin, stars Kevin James (King of Queens, Hitch) as novelist Sam Larson. When Larson’s latest book is published as nonfiction, he is mistaken for a real assassin, and has to take on the role of his own character to survive.

Creative Screenwriting sat down with writer Jeff Morris and writer-director Jeff Wadlow to discuss writing characters into a corner, collaborating with one simple goal in mind, and the difficulties of balancing action and comedy.

Can you share a little about your background and what led you into screenwriting?

Jeff Morris: I went to Arizona State, and was writing for the entertainment magazine there. I was interviewing a lot of actors, directors, and rock bands. I started to fall in love with writing, and I wanted to do something creative. I heard that people got paid to write movies so I started to look into how that happens, and slowly started picking up the craft.

Jeff Wadlow: I don’t remember the exact events personally, but my father has told me the story many times of when I was four and we walked out of Empire Strikes Back together, and I turned to him and said, “What does the director do exactly?”

Ever since then, I’ve known that I’ve wanted to be a writer-director, and have been telling stories with images. From monster movies with my friends in high school edited in camera on my VHS camcorder, to Tarantino rip-offs in college on 16mm, to my thesis film at USC, I’ve spent my whole life trying to tell stories that entertain and reach the widest audience possible. 

Where did the idea for this film come from?

JM: I got this idea from James Frey and what happened with A Million Little Pieces . My wife had read the book and she was a huge fan. When it turned out that it wasn’t real, I thought it was a really good jumping off point for a movie.

JW: When I got Jeff’s script, I loved the central idea, but it was much more of a comedy than an action movie. I had the idea of beefing up the action and making it more True Lies than Tropic Thunder. In the original draft everyone believed he was an assassin, which was a little surreal. I thought it would give the action more stakes if everyone slowly began to believe he was the real deal — including the hero himself. 

Did you write the part for Kevin James?

JM: I wrote it for an everyman. I’ve been in the business long enough to make screenplays in a way that a lot of different actors can play the role. When Kevin came on board, it was very thrilling because he’s definitely an everyman. As far as the role is written, you want it to be a regular guy, where you’re asking, “Is he an assassin or is he not as assassin?” Kevin can pull that off very well.

JW: I did the re-write for Kevin. I sent him Jeff’s script, and Kevin signed on with my new plan to ground the action and heighten the stakes. So I was really fortunate in that I could hear Kevin’s voice in my head while I was writing his dialogue. For a writer, knowing who your cast is going to be is such an incredible gift. 

Kevin James has a certain amount of physical comedy to his work. Were there any revisions made after he signed on?

JM: After Kevin came on, Jeff worked with Kevin to shape the film towards Kevin’s personality and fit what they wanted to do.

JW: Yeah, I had a very specific direction I wanted to take the script:setting it in South America, bringing in revolutionaries, intensifying the action. And I knew the more credible danger — and genuine pain — Kevin was in, the funnier it would be.

The story is relatively complex. There are three different groups in Venezuela that are all out to get one another, plus the CIA has some involvement. Has much research was involved this story?

JM: That would be zero. It was just something that I pulled out of my imagination. I wanted to paint him into a corner the best I could and let him figure his way out. It wanted it to be the ultimate look into how bad can things get and what would he do if that occurred to get out of it. It would just be funny to see him getting caught between bad guys who have rivalries in a world where there is no way out.

JW: You might be referring to some of the stuff I laced in in the re-write. I was really inspired by a book I called Confessions of An Economic Hitman that detailed US involvement in foreign countries and how they played different factions against each other to benefit US interests abroad. 

Where did the ideas come from for the protagonist’s imagination during action sequences?

JM: They were in the original script—the very first draft. I thought it was something that all writers can relate to. You know, we write our first draft and it’s never any good. So in the opening, he has this funny little device where he’s trying to figure out the best way to tell this story. He’s trying to do it a different ways.

JW: I loved what Jeff did with the imagination sequence in the first act, and really missed them after the opening. In the re-write, I seeded a few more of them throughout the body of the film to both surprise the audience and show them how Sam is still trying to solve problems like a writer, even when the problems are real.

What were the cinematic influences in writing this film—either in terms of action or comedy?

JM: For this movie, I was really inspired by Romancing the Stone. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. I wanted for Kevin to basically be Kathleen Turner in the jungle. I wanted to create that same kind of fun world.

I also grew up on movies like ¡Three Amigos! which is also a mistaken identity movie as well. Those sort of inspirations made it feel right to craft it that way.

JW: For me, it was really more True Lies. I love that movie because it both makes fun of action movie tropes while delivering genuinely thrilling action. 

What was the influence for the CIA duo played by Rob Riggle and Leonard Earl Howze?

JM: The CIA is sort of my cynical look at geo-politics. I wanted those guys to be operating in these banana republics. It’s also this statement on how America can have their influence in this tiny little countries in different ways, but it’s almost like they’re playing Fantasy Football, but with real lives.

JW: When I re-wrote those guys, I was really channeling Rosewood and Taggart from Beverly Hills Cop, and believe it or not, Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show. I sort of thought of them as this Greek Chorus, talking to the audience and existing outside the story, until they eventually get pulled into the narrative themselves (just like I imagine the real CIA does in a third world country, they are hands off until they have no choice but to intercede). 

There are several comedians involved with this film. How much improvisation made its way to the final cut?

JW: We were on a very tight schedule and I was already stretching the budget beyond what seemed reasonable, so we didn’t have a ton of time on the set to riff. Don’t get me wrong, we did some, but less than you would imagine. I prefer to try things out in rehearsal when you don’t have two hundred people waiting for you to call action.

When the pressure’s off, you can be a lot more creative. This then gives me time to work those improvs into the script, and riff on them myself as a writer, so we know exactly what we are shooting on the day. Of course, there were still some laugh-out-loud moments that happened on the set. You can’t stop them when you have a cast as talented as ours. 

Netflix is making a lot of movies recently. How did they get involved, and how are they different than other production companies?

JM: After they got Kevin James, the producers took the package to the Cannes Film Festival where they sold the rights to Netflix, who made it a few months later.

On all accounts, from what I’ve heard, Netflix is very supportive to everyone within the creative process. I couldn’t be more thankful to get this movie made after trying for so long.

JW: Netflix was incredibly supportive. They totally bought into my take on the movie. So much so, that a couple times I tried to step away to work on something else, and they were like, “No way — you are our guy. We bought into your vision for this film and that’s what we want.” It’s a real gift to work with a studio that backs a filmmaker so completely. 

What difficulties did you face when writing the film?

[Warning: this answer contains spoilers.]

JM: Getting it all to work out. What I realized is that it’s really fun to paint people into a corner, but then you have to get out without getting paint all over you.

So you have a guy who’s been hired to kill the Prime Minister of a country, and what’s he going to do to get out of it? In the original draft, the President actually has a heart attack and died. In the movie, he ends up killing himself.

But that moment, when our hero walks out of the room, people thought that he just killed the President of a country, which makes him look even more like the assassin that some people thought he was.

Or, you could say, he becomes the assassin that nobody thought he was. For me, that moment in the script was it, because it was difficult to figure out the solution to that problem and making it work.

It was really rewarding to find that solution. I remember where I was when I came up with it. I was actually trying to talk out the scene with a friend of mine. I was walking in circles and I actually said, “I’ve got to go” and hung up on him. Then I went and wrote it and there it was.

JW: That moment from Jeff’s original draft is so incredible, it was one of the main reasons I signed on. When the leader of this country (it was Belize in his draft, Venezuela in mine) dies in front of our hero, you know that the story is really working. Originally it was a heart attack, which felt a little coincidental, so I changed it to a suicide that resulted from Kevin’s character getting him to confess to corruption while wearing a wire.

For me, that’s a perfect example of how this film was written. Jeff had this fantastic initial idea, and then I refined it. It’s funny to think about, that we never sat in a room together to work on the script, but it’s very much a product of both of us contributing to the final product. This is why I love filmmaking so much… it really is collaborative art.

On the re-write, the hardest parts for me were recalibrating the characters, creating new ones, and designing new sequences that fit the tone I was going for. Jeff had written a very funny, very broad comedy, and I wanted something with a little more teeth.

I didn’t want to just parody action movies, I wanted to deliver on the promise of an action movie, too. This is a tonal tightrope, and incorporating the elements that were working, while inventing new character and sequences that wouldn’t fit this new iteration, was incredibly difficult. 

There are a lot of enemies in the film: how did you keep them distinct?

JW: In the original draft there were warring Latino cartels, and to be honest, I couldn’t even keep them straight. I think that was part of the fun of Jeff’s draft.

But when I did the re-write, I wanted to be able to play along with our lead. So I came up with the notion that El Toro was more of a guerrilla than a drug smuggler, and that his rival, a genuine cartel kingpin, was actually Russian instead of Latino.

I also created the character of General Ruiz, so that the current administration could pose a threat as well.

A lot of their character traits were designed so that they would be instantly memorable. I knew with this twisting narrative, it would be critical to have incredibly distinct characters.

Do you have any writing rituals?

JM: In the mornings I’ll help get the kids ready for school, and then I’ll go surf for a couple of hours. I come back around 10 or 11am, and then write for the rest of the afternoon until its time to take my son to hockey or my daughter to soccer, and then I call it a day. 

I set daily goals for myself and I give myself permission to quit once I’ve achieved the goal. I’m not one to be a slave to hours on the keyboard. If I need five pages, then that’s what I do. If the pages are good, then that’s great, if they suck, then I start cleaning it up the following day and making it better. Then, I start on that new day’s goals.

JW: I often have to write a lot of material fast because I tend to get myself wrapped up in multiple projects at once. For this reason, my only real ritual is pressure. I do my best work when I’m under the gun. 

Do you have any advice for new screenwriters?

JM: Really believe in a script…This was my baby. It was the first spec script that I had ever sold. It has gotten me a lot of jobs in my career.

I really believed that it could be a movie within this action-comedy world, and I wasn’t ready to let it go. That’s why I kept working when the original production company fell into bankruptcy and producers left the project.

Eventually, it found its home and I think that’s because I truly believed that this could be something good and fun, and I didn’t want to let that go.

JW: Never stop writing. The more you write, the better your chances are of getting something made. And always try to have a unique point of view on the material. That’s what will separate you from other writers. 

Finally, is there anything else you’d like to share about the film?

JW: I’m just really grateful to Jeff Morris for coming up with this unique idea. If it weren’t for him, the movie wouldn’t exist. I’m also in the debt of Kevin James, Todd Garner, and the rest of our incredible cast and crew. It was a ton of work making True Memoirs, but it’s a film I’m incredibly proud of it. Hope you enjoy the movie!

Featured image: Kevin James as Sam Larson in True Memoirs of an International Assassin. Photo by Matt Kennedy – © 2016 – Netflix

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